An official website of the United States government
Abstract Food loss and waste (FLW) is a major challenge to food system sustainability, including aquatic foods. We investigated aquatic FLW in the food supply of the United States, the largest importer of aquatic food globally, using primary and secondary data and life cycle methodology. We show that there are significant differences in FLW among species, production technology, origin and stage of supply chain. We estimate total aquatic FLW was 22.7%, which is 43–55% lower than earlier estimates reported in the literature, illustrating the importance of applying a disaggregated approach. Production losses associated with imported food contribute over a quarter of total FLW, and addressing these losses requires multinational efforts to implement interventions along the supply chain. These findings inform prioritization of solutions—including areas of need for innovations, government incentives, policy change, infrastructure and equity.
more »
« less
A framework to quantify mass flow and assess food loss and waste in the US food supply chain
Abstract Reducing food loss and waste can improve the efficiency of food supply chains and provide food security. Here we estimate mass flow as well as food loss and waste along the US food supply chain for 10 commodity groups and nine management pathways to provide a baseline for designing efficient strategies to reduce, recycle, and recover food loss and waste. We estimate a total food loss and waste of 335.4 million metric tonnes from the U.S. food supply chain in 2016. Water evaporation (19%), recycling (55%), and landfill, incineration, or wastewater treatment (23%) accounted for most of the loss and waste. The consumption stage accounted for 57% of the food loss and waste disposed of through landfill, incineration, or wastewater treatment. Manufacturing was the largest contributor to food loss and waste (61%) but had a high recycling rate. High demand, perishable products accounted for 67% of food waste. We suggest that funding for infrastructure and incentives for earlier food donation can promote efficiency and sustainability of the supply chain, promote FLW collection and recycling along the U.S. FSC, and improve consumer education in order to move towards a circular economy.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2021956
- PAR ID:
- 10416702
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Communications Earth & Environment
- Volume:
- 3
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2662-4435
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Zero food waste city 2049: Identifying barriers to transition pathways Daniel Black, Ian Roderick, Adina Paytan, Sue Charlesworth and Joy Carey from an Urban Living Lab in the UK have tested newly integrated systems approaches and valuation methods to understand how to reduce the city's food waste. Food waste costs the UK billions of pounds each year and much of it is avoidable. The challenge for the WASTE FEW ULL research project was to produce and test methods for identifying inefficiencies in the food-energy-water (FEW) nexus in urban settings. Looking in particular at Bristol city, which throws away 48,000 tonnes of food waste each year, the team looked into how they could transform Bristol into a sustainable food city. Stakeholder concerns arose including the nutrient overload problem in water systems and the economic recovery of phosphate; the large amount of food waste from the city linked to food security issues; the energy and carbon footprint of the digestate produced from the anaerobic digestors; the economic challenges of reducing food waste; the plastic contamination of waste streams; sewage system blockages; and the difficulties of recycling sewage and wastewater. This research looks at the challenge of phosphorous recapture from sewage through extensive discussions agreed to shift the project focus to residential food waste reduction and processing (and the associated plastic contamination). The team eventually began looking at the critical concept of resilience and economic efficiency, working to substantially reduce inefficiencies in a city-regions FEW nexuses.more » « less
-
Abstract Food consumption and production are separated in space through flows of food along complex supply chains. These food supply chains are critical to our food security, making it important to evaluate them. However, detailed spatial information on food flows within countries is rare. The goal of this paper is to estimate food flows between all county pairs within the United States. To do this, we develop the Food Flow Model, a data-driven methodology to estimate spatially explicit food flows. The Food Flow Model integrates machine learning, network properties, production and consumption statistics, mass balance constraints, and linear programming. Specifically, we downscale empirical information on food flows between 132 Freight Analysis Framework locations (17 292 potential links) to the 3142 counties and county-equivalents of the United States (9869 022 potential links). Subnational food flow estimates can be used in future work to improve our understanding of vulnerabilities within a national food supply chain, determine critical infrastructures, and enable spatially detailed footprint assessments.more » « less
-
Abstract The growing burden of waste disposal coupled with natural resource scarcity has renewed interest in the remediation, valorization, and/or repurposing of waste. Traditional approaches such as composting, anaerobic digestion, use in fertilizers or animal feed, or incineration for energy production extract very little value out of these waste streams. In contrast, waste valorization into fuels and other biochemicals via microbial fermentation is an area of growing interest. In this review, we discuss microbial valorization of nonconventional, aqueous waste streams such as food processing effluents, wastewater streams, and other industrial wastes. We categorize these waste streams as carbohydrate-rich food wastes, lipid-rich wastes, and other industrial wastes. Recent advances in microbial valorization of these nonconventional waste streams are highlighted, along with a discussion of the specific challenges and opportunities associated with impurities, nitrogen content, toxicity, and low productivity.more » « less
-
Given the recent interest in food waste recycling from a sustainability perspective and the impending New York State (NYS) policy banning the disposal of food waste in landfills, the demand for food waste hauling services will soon increase in NYS. Commercial establishments generating two tons of food waste per week will be subject to these new regulations, but will expect to pay no more than their current disposal costs for food waste collection. However, new services will face more complex decisions than traditional waste hauling due to the variability in food waste generated and material constraints of food waste recycling facilities. This paper considers the shift in transportation practices to meet the complexities of food waste management. Current transportation perspectives exist to help waste hauling companies solve their allocation and routing decision problems, but material blending during network routing is relatively new. A formulation that presents allocation and blending of food waste to different recycling facilities is presented and applied to Western NYS, showing a small transportation cost decrease. As promising as the results from this example are, future work should focus on combining allocation, routing, and blending of food waste to create a complete picture of waste hauling in emerging food waste recycling networks.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-022-00414-9
